Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal

by James D. Hornfischer

But the significance of the Guadalcanal campaign was never about just war matériel or real estate. Though the idea had haunted Yamamoto from the beginning that American victory was inevitable, the outcome was not foreordained by advantages in industry and war production. As the French Army’s performance against Germany in 1940 had suggested, arms and matériel were not sufficient for victory. It had to be seized by men with an active will to fight. On that score Japan had misestimated the United States as, in Weinberg’s words, “unwilling to pay the price in blood and treasure to retake islands of which they had never heard, only to be returned to allies for whose colonial empires they had only disdain.”